Wanted by the F.B.I., but Still Popular With the Ex-Mother-in-Law

If the Federal Bureau of Investigation and some medical records are correct, a tough-looking mob associate named Jack Mannino robbed a Brooklyn bank two weeks ago while wearing an adult diaper.

How did it come to this? Mr. Mannino has done himself no favors, to be sure, but recent years have been unkind. A string of more than 20 bank robberies in the 1990s put Mr. Mannino in prison for more than a decade. He turned 40 in 2008, with nine years of prison behind him and three more still ahead. He lost half his colon to cancer, and suffered incontinence behind bars. He lost his mother, too, and was denied permission to attend her funeral.

But it was not always this way, and in these dark times, Mr. Mannino appears to have sought comfort by revisiting a brief and relatively happy period in his life, a time when a big finger pressed a pause button on his life of crime. The city boy — in a page from a fish-out-of-water script — thought back to his time in Sylvester, Ga., population 6,188.

There, in the Deep South, people remember a different Jack Mannino.

“Jack is kind of a laid-back fellow,” said Nancy Ethredge, 64, from her home in Sylvester, near Albany. She said she rarely travels, hates airplanes and would never visit New York City of her own free will, but she was always impressed by that young man from Brooklyn who stole not money, but her daughter’s heart.

In New York, in the 1990s, Mr. Mannino was a master electrician by trade, but he also had an arrest record dating back to when he was 17. The F.B.I. identified him as a Gambino crime family associate. He decided, it seems, to leave these paths behind him in favor of his Uncle Vinny down South.

Photo

Jack Mannino, known as the "Seven-Second Bandit" for robberies in the 1990s.Credit
F.B.I.

That would be Vincenzo Mannino, once of Palermo, Italy. He had settled in Georgia in the 1970s and opened an Italian restaurant and pizzeria in Albany, Mama Gina’s, named for his wife. It became a popular spot. Twenty years later, in the early ’90s, along came his nephew Jack.

“He come down here, he did,” Vincenzo Mannino, 62, said with a still-distinct Italian accent. “He lived with me in my house. He’s a good guy. He’s smart.”

The uncle put Jack Mannino to work at the restaurant, making pizzas. It was hard work. “He go home, take a shower, go to bed,” his uncle recalled.

At Mama Gina’s, he met a young single mother named Terri. “Before you could turn around, they were married,” said Terri’s mother, Ms. Ethredge. The reception was held at the restaurant. Vincenzo Mannino said he fed 200 that day.

The couple moved in with Terri’s mother, who learned a few things. “Jack had been in jail, which I didn’t know at the time that my daughter married him,” she recalled. “Someone kept stealing our tools — stealing them and stealing them. We thought it might be Jack, because he had been a thief, and come to find out it was the neighbor across the street.”

The couple decamped for Brooklyn. “I baked his mother a fruitcake and sent it to her, and she thought that was the best thing she ever ate,” Ms. Ethredge said. Mr. Mannino worked for an electrician. But the marriage soured.

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Jack Mannino was one of two men, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said, who robbed a bank in Brooklyn two weeks ago.Credit
F.B.I.

“My daughter said he probably wouldn’t stop stealing,” Ms. Ethredge said. “That’s why she left him. They went into a place, with plenty of money, and he stole a card. A greeting card.” Mr. Mannino also hit his wife, breaking her jaw, Ms. Ethredge said.

His wife and her children returned to Georgia. Mr. Mannino quit his job and robbed 23 banks, the police said. He was dubbed the “Seven-Second Bandit” for his method of carrying a shoebox and informing the tellers that it carried a bomb that would explode in seven seconds if his demands were not met.

In prison, he called his former mother-in-law. “How am I doing, and how’s Terri and the girls?” Ms. Ethredge said, recalling his questions. She sent pictures. Uncle Vinny sent money. His nephew told him, “Inside prison, I don’t worry about nothing,” he said.

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After his bout with cancer, Mr. Mannino seemed reformed. “Life, I’ve come to realize, is far too short and far too precious to squander away in prison,” he wrote in a letter to a federal judge in 2008. “I’ve been a liability to the system and to my family for too many years, and I’m anxious to prove that I can be an asset.” A doctor wrote a supporting letter that said Mr. Mannino could stop wearing diapers with a proper diet.

He was released first to a halfway house and then, six months ago, from prison oversight completely. On Dec. 29, two men robbed a Capital One Bank in Bensonhurst. One of them, the F.B.I. announced, was Mr. Mannino. He remains at large.

In Sylvester, his former mother-in-law is still his biggest fan — “These politicians have robbed a hell of a lot more,” she said — but she is disappointed. She’s ready to dispense some tough love.

“If he spent that much time in prison and this didn’t teach him a lesson,” she said, “well, he needs to go back.”

E-mail: crimescene@nytimes.com

Twitter: @mwilsonnyt

A version of this article appears in print on January 14, 2012, on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Wanted by the F.B.I., but Still Popular With the Ex-Mother-in-Law. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe